My new job

Glad to be the provider of many yuks regarding my role as laundry wench. Sorry to disappoint those of you who are looking for tips on how to remove grass stains - my core tasks have been folding towels and pressing table clothes and bedding for the Holiday Village and Ein Gev Fish Restaurant - I don't do people clothes.

I have been rotated into the restaurant - wouldn't necisarily consider it a promotion, lets call it a 'lateral move'. It's slightly more interesting cause the restaurant gets large groups - primarily Christian groups, prominently from the US but from all over the world. Some of you may already know this...being that I am presently residing on the Sea of Galilee a.k.a. Lake Kinneret, the sea was where this guy Jesus supposedly walked on water, over across on the Tiberias side (West side of the lake). Some say the water was really low that day and it was all an optical illusion. Regardless, people thought it was a nifty party trick and then he pulled out all the stops by multiplying the St Peters Fish (a.k.a. Tilapia) and fed the starving class - could have been a metaphor, could have been a school of unlucky fish passing thru on the wrong day, who knows, I wasn't really there that day but this guy got a lot of cred for it and impressed a bunch of folks. So now in present day there are these party boats and religious boats that sail from Tiberias over to Ein Gev to eat at our fish restaurant to sample the miraculous St Peters Fish. Most of the groups are evangelical, they bow there heads before meals, sing hymms, stuff like that. The Americans (always very gracious) compliment me on how good my English is, wonder if one can scuba dive in the Dead Sea and are easily freaked out when we serve the fish with the heads still on (that was me too once). Ironically, the Israeli's are our most ill-mannered customers, even the Israeli staff at the restaurant say so. After a group of Israeli's, we don't really need to clear the tables, we just hose down the floors - it's sort of like an onslaught rather than a dinning experience.

I do have an added appreciation for the English as a Second Language community, now that I am in a Hebrew as a Second Language state of mind. For the most part, it is ridiculous how unnecisary it is for me to learn Hebrew. Everyone speaks English, including the volunteers from Gemany, Sweden, Switzerland, Korea, Japan, Ecuador (guess the Brits, Canadians, South Africans and the Scot are sort of in my camp) - Israel is extremely accomodating to my mother tongue. The exception is when waiting on a group of 20 to 100 Israeli's who are asking me for, lets say, lemonade in Hebrew and I bring them lemons. Or they ask for more hummus in an overly gestured, slow, overly enunciated manner and then snicker at their table as I go to get it for them - which leads me to wonder, are they trying to be helpful or patronizing? I'm seeming to be mentally blocked in how to say "I don't speak Hebrew" in Hebrew, so they wind up speaking English for me - if they didn't yell and snap their fingers at me so much (really to all of us), I might think it was considerate of them.

With this added pearl of life experience, I would like to throw a shout out to all the bus boys in the world I might have rolled my eyes at for not understanding when I needed a clean fork, more bread, or more water - SORRY DUDES!